We’re seeing lots of headlines on election cybersecurity this week after Rex Tillerson, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, and this morning, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper continued to raise the alarm about the vulnerability of the 2018 elections to outside influence and hacking.
Unfortunately when it comes to our voting systems, very little has changed from the 2016 elections:
- Several large states still lack systems with a voter-verified paper record, critical to be able to check for hacks, errors or even to do a meaningful recount.
- Only 2 states (RI and CO) have risk-limiting audits which assure that the machine vote count can be checked for accuracy against the paper ballots cast.
- As we saw in the 2016 recount effort, in most cases, even where paper ballots were available, there was no provision to check that the machine counts of cast ballots were accurate.
More information and how to get involved at: SecureOurVote.us.
Great resources at VerifiedVoting.org.
And here is the Center for American Progress’s 50-state report on election cybersecurity.
Thanks to our allies at Public Citizen for this information.